Friends Reunited - History
About us - by Michael Murphy, CEO 
Chapter one - pregnancy delivers a great idea
The idea behind Friends Reunited was concocted back in July 1999 in Steve and Julie Pankhurst's suburban semi in Barnet, North London . Julie was pregnant and whilst some women crave honey and marmite sandwiches, she was curious about what her old school friends were up to. Did they all have families of their own? Did they still live in the same area? Were they married, divorced, still alive?!
At the same time Steve, along with his business partner, Jason, was looking at original ideas to develop for the internet. They realised that the internet was an ideal medium to get back in touch with old friends.
It was a simple idea and in theory easy to implement or so they thought. However Julie did not have the internet skills to write such a site. Her intention was to learn them whilst on maternity leave, little realising the demands of a new-born baby! So instead she nagged Steve until eventually he and Jason got round to it. And so the site was born in the back bedroom of the house.
Within the first few weeks of putting the site live they received an email from one of the few members telling them about the success he had had meeting up with an old school friend after 30 years. This was a very rewarding start and gave them heart to continue.
The site's name started to spread slowly through friends telling their friends. It began to appear on other sites' message boards as a great way of tracking down old friends. All of Julie and Steve's spare time was spent answering the constant flow of emails, adding schools, promoting and developing the site.
Friends Reunited was officially launched in July 2000 and by the end of the year it had 3,000 registered members. They redesigned the site and created a new logo which is still used today. The aim was to make the site really simple to use and quick to download. By the way, the people in the logo are Steve's mum and dad and two of his friends.
Chapter two 2001: sleepless nights!
2001 had a memorable start thanks to the Steve Wright's Radio 2 show. One day, unbeknown to Steve and Julie, Friends Reunited had been nominated 'Website of the Day'. That same evening the site died several times! Tens of thousands of listeners decided to log on their poor little single server just couldn't cope! With the help of Jason they worked throughout the night to upgrade the server and managed to bring the site back to life every time it died! 3,000 people registered that week. They were amazed.
By February the site had 19,000 members. People seemed to be driven by nostalgia or maybe curiosity. There certainly seems to be a social need to reconnect with the past.
Friends Reunited had become a full-time job. A decision had to be made. In order for the site to continue they needed to generate an income from it. It was a hard decision - this was the make or break time for Friends Reunited. When they set up the site Steve and Julie had not realised its full potential. They had hoped to get an income from companies advertising on the site but this simply did not work. So they reluctantly introduced an annual charge for people wanting to contact old friends through the site. Luckily it was well received by the members.
By May the snowball effect had started to become an avalanche. The site now had 96,000 members. It had hit "critical mass" - a point where anyone registering would recognise at least one name. As a result it started to become a genuine talking point in offices, pubs and at dinner parties.
Every spare minute of their time was spent working on the site. Between Jason, his wife Ann, Julie and Steve, the site was monitored, developed, emails answered, interviews done and hardware installed.
By August Friends Reunited had one million members. From one server at the start of the year, the site had grown to handle up to 5 million hits a day and 15 servers had to be added to cope with the demand.
It had become a household name, with mentions in Private Eye and on Have I Got News For You . Then there was the request to appear on the Weakest Link - which Steve and Julie declined!
Chapter three - 2002: a phenomenal year
Friends Reunited started the year with over 4 million members and ended it with over 8 million!
Workplaces was launched in February so people could find old work colleagues and immediately it was a hit. Steve personally got three emails from old workmates in the first two weeks.
Julie finally had a reunion with some of her old primary school friends (was she the last in the country to have a reunion?!) and in March, she gave birth to her second child Sally and took some maternity leave. No such break for Steve as he took over all interviews!
On 1st April Paws Reunited was launched. A lot of people tried to register their pets without realising it was an April fool!
In July, an office was opened in Oxted for some of the staff. The rest continued to work from home.
In August 2002 the first Friends Reunited baby was born, many more followed.
Sites were launched in Australia , South Africa and New Zealand and they quickly got underway with success stories coming in, proving that reuniting is popular world wide.
New listings were added so members could link up with old teams, clubs and associations. More reuniting!
Steve and Julie went on Danny Baker's radio show. It turns out he's a big fan. After a search on the site for famous people it showed that a lot of celebs are using the site just like everyone else.
In November 2002 a new service called Genes Connected (now Genes Reunited), was tested which allows people to build their family trees on line and search other people's in the hope for matches.
What an amazing year.
Chapter 4 2003: decision time
The beginning of 2003 was a time for Steve and Julie to reflect and think about how they wanted the site to develop. Friends Reunited had grown into such a phenomenon; they had to consider the future. When they set it up they never imagined in a million years that it would grow so big and have the potential to grow so much bigger.
This is where I stepped in - the decision was made to bring in a new management team that included myself as CEO, Rob Mogford as CFO and Tim Ward as Marketing Director to oversea the day-to-day running and take the site into the future.
And so the development of the site and phenomenon of Friends Reunited continued:
School exam tests were added to the site for anyone wanting to re-sit old maths, biology and physics papers (you may laugh, but there has been quite a demand for them) and two new listings Streets for reuniting with old neighbours and Forces enabled even more reunions to take place.
We also introduced a new message board on the site for nostalgia such as music, films, TV and games and keeping with the reminiscing theme, the first Friends Reunited CD, an 80s compilation, hit the shops and went gold, selling over 100,000 copies. This was followed by compilations for the 90s, 50s, 60s and 70s.
In May we officially launched Genes Reunited, which proved immediately popular as it tapped into people's desires to find out who they are and where they come from. It works by connecting you with your extended family through the sharing of information, enabling you to graphically build your own family tree, explore your family history and potentially connect with living relatives.
Friends Reunited Dating was launched in September 2003 for those looking for new friends and possibly romance, following feedback that our single members wanted to make new friends in a trusted, comfortable and friendly environment. It has grown to 350,000 registered members and is currently the fastest growing dating site in the UK and already the 5th largest.
Friends Reunited generates so many incredible stories we decided to compile them into a book, Friends Reunited remarkable real life stories'. It hit the shelves in November 2003 followed a year later by a paperback edition. We even inspired a BBC TV game show called Class Of which brought together old classmates, presented by Zoe Ball and ITV's With a Little Help from our Friends, a series of hour-long prime-time specials based on the site, which is now into its third series.
And thank you to all who voted us in the No. 1 Digital Brand in the UK (NOP Sept 2003) and the Top 10 Most Influential Sites Ever (Nielsen net ratings Dec 2003).
Chapter 5 2004: onwards and upwards
In 2004 we made our first acquisition, buying schoolfriends.com.au - an Australian site doing the same thing as Friends Reunited, but much earlier in their development.
Reunion Organiser was also launched last year, making it easier for you to get your old friends back together, by sending a group message to all the ex-students from your choice of years. There's a personalised reunion message board too, for staying in contact before the reunion and sharing the fun afterwards.
For universities and colleges an Alumni service was introduced, providing an own-branded page on the site to effectively communicate their alumni message to former students. The service also allows them to build a mailing list of ex-pupils and to distribute newsletters, so that you can be kept up to date with all their news.
More and more of you registered on the site as Friends Reunited became available on Sky Interactive, taking our membership number up to 10 million.
But it wasn't only Friends Reunited that had a good year, 2004 saw Genes Connected change its name to Genes Reunited and triple its membership to 2.3 million by the end of the year with close to 30 million names listed. It's become an excellent way to find long lost relatives and the success stories of family reunions just keep rolling in with two relatives being added to the site every second of every day.
Chapter 6 2005: we celebrate our fifth birthday
We had a great start to the New Year with the registration of our 12 millionth member on Friends Reunited, that means that roughly half of all adults in the UK with internet access are now registered on the site, so the chances of finding old friends are even greater.
And you can now search for friends across the globe all from the one site as we've been busy building an international database merging our sites in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa together.
It seems that more and more of you are also using our other sites Genes Reunited, Friends Reunited Dating and the recently added Friends Reunited Jobs. Moving job is a big deal and what we hope is simply to make finding the right job or candidate the really easy bit, just like we have for finding old friends, finding relatives and finding romance.
The latest addition is Friends Connections, helping you link up with new friends with similar interests, both local and global; if you're into model railways or maybe you just want to find a new tennis partner you'll be able find someone else with your interests on the site.
Site Stats
- 12 million people registered (about half of all UK households with internet access)
- 5,000 new members registered on average per day (more than enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall every day)
- 4,500 years spent looking at the site by the UK public (if you started reading when the Pyramids were built, you'd just be finishing now)
- 6.5 billion pages of the website looked at in total (that's the same as reading 4.2 million copies of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy)
- We've lost count of the number of success stories that have come in.
Chapter 7: we join forces with ITV
And so we start a new chapter in our history as we merge with Britain 's favourite TV company ITV.
Our priority has always been to make Friends Reunited bigger and better as the more of us there are on the site the more friends we will be able to reunite with, the more family we will be able to discover and the more chances we have of finding a soul mate or even a new job.
When ITV approached us we immediately clicked; they share our values, they're a national institution that is trusted and well loved, and by joining with them, Friends Reunited will become the UK 's 8 th most visited site giving us access to a vast audience so we can connect even more of you even more of the time.
Rest assured that the principles Friends Reunited have been founded on will not change; the group of sites will remain simple to use, family friendly, confidential and always great value for money and your details will remain safe and secure with us.
Steve and Julie Pankhurst, the founders of Friends Reunited, handed over the reigns to me and my team three years ago, so that they could step away from the day-to-day running of the site to spend more time with their family.
We've been handling everything ever since and we hope you'll agree, that we've added some really useful stuff including a family tree building service, a dating site, a job search facility and a new social networking site.
Steve and Julie now feel that the business has grown up and it's time for them to completely let go, knowing that it's in safe hands, but we're all staying on and will continue to be here for a long time to come. After al, turning a simple idea into Britain 's internet success story has been hugely rewarding for everyone involved, but we still have work to do as only half the country is signed-up and there are plenty of great websites out there yet to be created! Go back to top of page
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